


wait out the sun

by silent_masque



Series: we could be heroes [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Banter, Galra Keith (Voltron), M/M, Pre-Slash, daring rescues, i guess it could be gen if you really wanted it to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 22:57:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13063923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silent_masque/pseuds/silent_masque
Summary: Keith will never manage to take the throne anyways; he might as well take what he can with him on his way out.(It's Shiro. He's taking Shiro with him on his way out.)(or: the prologue for a superhero AU)





	wait out the sun

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for the GREAT BETA to gala! is there more? yes. is it drafted yet? no. is there an OUTLINE? heck yeah there is. title is from heroes by alessio ft. tovelo, but specifically [this version](https://youtu.be/ezW31Cx-e5o?t=216)!

Keith is the red marble. 

He always has to be red. When he tries to be the blue spinel or peridot or the smoky quartz one, the marbles don’t say anything until he makes himself the red one. But the problem with red is that it’s messy and stubborn and doesn’t give what it knows easily. When he tries to pry into it, lurid shots of color streak past and curl like smoke around his visions, hanging with the specter of people he has yet to meet.

Still, while he gathers the other marbles into their pouch, he makes sure to carefully pocket the red one. 

If it has to be him, then he’s going to take good care of it. 

xxx

When Keith rolls the marbles out onto the tabletop, the smoky quartz lists, slowly falls out of the pouch, doesn’t move very far at all. It stays close to his red, like a magnet. 

Keith nudges smoky quartz with a finger, squinting down at it. 

It spins and rolls around his red, still. Smoky quartz orbits around his red like a planet around a star. 

Unfortunate. 

Smoky quartz is his least favorite. The visions caught in it come away sticky, with wisps of what might be the past and what might be the future trailing around. It hides and it’s messy and it makes Keith work for its visions. 

Keith picks it up anyways, holds it up against one eye and covers the other and watches. 

xxx

_ Smoky quartz unfolds lazily at its own pace.  _

_ One tendril gets thrown out, and Keith thinks he catches a glimpse of a man: black hair with a shock of white, a scar over the bridge of his nose, dark eyes.  _

_ Another slides across, even slower to open, and drags with it the image of that man, with his arm slung over Keith’s shoulder. An embrace. Stars glitter behind them, and Keith’s not sure if they’re stars from the marble or from a sky he’s never seen before.  _

_ The last moment is dredged from the depths, groaning under the weight of itself. The man is fighting, a Galran sword flashing bright in his hands. He strikes out, first with the blade, then with his arm - straight through the heart of his enemy.  _

_ The glass vibrates, hums a word he can barely catch.  _

Champion.

xxx

Keith has always left the comms on while he worked, but now, it’s with purpose. Haggar wrinkles her nose at him when he listens, so he keeps doing it. Obviously. 

Soldier minutiae is easy to ignore; he leaves it in the background while he divines and draws battle plans for their next assault. Today’s comms are loud though. Frantic, nonstop, and desperate. 

(Is it Keith, or is the smoky quartz hot? He has it tucked away in his jacket next to red, so Haggar can’t see it and can’t after it.) 

“You were meant for greater things,” Haggar sneers from her corner, “than this drivel.” She has an imperious finger raised, pointed at the comms, ready to blast the unit into oblivion or maybe even shut the whole system down. 

Her taste for dramatics is tiring.

“Someday, I’ll command our armies,” Keith says, spinning the amethyst marble around on the table, swirling it in circles near the edges. He watches its progress instead of bothering with her. “How else should I learn?”

Amethyst is Haggar’s marble, angry and spiteful and elegant, and she hates when he messes with it. She hates when he plays with any of the marbles, but especially hers. Which, of course, is why he keeps doing it. 

“If you hope to command anything, then you’ll return to your studies, Your Highness.” Keith broaches no arguments; Haggar’s tone is acidic and her tongue gets too sharp for him when she’s upset, but Keith could do without the condescension. Haggar may be the Emperor’s closest advisor, but she will be nothing once Keith takes the throne. 

If he ever makes it to the throne, that is. 

Keith scowls and lets amethyst roll. It loops around his red once before settling at iolite’s side. As if she’d be anywhere else but the Emperor’s side. The door hisses open, and Haggar’s robes shuffle away. Back to the throne room, like her marble. 

The comms crackle to life again after she leaves. 

“Your Majesty, we have recaptured and subdued the prisoner. Where should we take him?” 

“Bring him to the throne room. I need to teach our Champion a lesson.” 

xxx

Shouts echo down the hall, and Keith tries not to flinch back. The smell of ozone is thick in the air, though, which means that Haggar is at work. Keith really can only wince in sympathy where he is, hovering outside the door and loitering in the hall with a hand wrapped tight around his pouch of marbles inside his jacket.

Smoky quartz is burning hot in his hand, but it’s nothing Keith isn’t willing to suffer for his marbles. Even when it sparks a little, when the smoke wavers inside of it, threaded through with purple lightning. 

There’s a hairline crack running through the middle. 

Keith squeezes the marble even closer. It’s not broken yet. (Not like the remains of the moonstone that he still keeps close to his heart - closer, even, than the red one.)

He waves off the patrols who stop and tilt their heads at him. 

The Emperor will know that he’s here. The Emperor probably already knows, actually; Keith eyes one of the hallway cameras warily and hunches down a little more in his hiding spot. Someone will ask after him soon. Why he’s skulking around the throne room. Why he likes to talk to the engineers so much. Why he fiddles with the comms so often. Why he bothers with the armory at all. 

(Hopefully he’ll be gone by then.)

The bitter smell of Druid magic and the crackling of lightning taper off again. It’s been off and on for awhile now. This Champion can take a fucking beating. Keith has been sitting long enough to get a cramp in his legs and more than a couple of patrols looking at him oddly. He steadies a hand over his knife, eyeing the hall warily. 

(It’s too early for him to outright oppose the emperor yet. He doesn’t have the support. He’d never make it out alive. They’d slit his throat and be done with him, prince or not. 

But.

Just in case.

It doesn’t hurt him to be prepared.)

But no, the doors finally slide open with a hiss, and Keith peeks out when the sentries march into the corridor. They hang a left, towards him, dragging someone between two of them, with a third walking behind, a gun primed in its hands. 

The Champion. 

Out like a light, hanging limp in the sentries’ arms. There’s a scar across the bridge of his nose now that matches the hairline fracture. 

The Champion is devastating. They pass so close, Keith can almost reach out and grab him and run away. 

He doesn’t. 

The sentries march on. 

xxx

“Who’s the Champion?”

Haggar slides him a glare. At least half of it is for not working hard at his magic, surely. 

Honestly, it’s not even shocking anymore how much Keith doesn’t care. He just stares back. 

“Irrelevant to you, whelp.” She’s getting testy. Keith bites back a grin, mostly. 

Not every prisoner gets the personal attention of Haggar and the Emperor. Even Keith barely gets the time of day from him. Haggar is stuck with him, but that’s because she has to be, not because she wants to be. (To be fair, Keith doesn’t want to be near her either.) 

“Doesn’t seem that irrelevant.” 

Haggar’s eyes narrow. The air crackles sharply around her. Keith knows that she can’t hurt him - she’s not allowed to. Express orders from the Emperor himself. But that doesn’t mean that she wouldn’t  _ try _ .

He wants to keep pushing her, but he’s more likely to get singed than get information. 

“The Champion is still not of your concern,” Haggar announces imperiously. He wants to roll his eyes. The only thing that actually stops him is the fact that if he did, he’d probably lose one. “You are beneath him.”

Keith crosses his arms instead, pressing a hand over where smoky is tucked away into the depths of his robe with its hairline crack. It’s irritating, but she’s not wrong. What does he know of the Champion besides the way he looks under the stars and how easily he smiles? Keith doesn’t even know his name. 

xxx

“You called me. Your Majesty,” he tacks on idly, an afterthought. 

Haggar sent him a filthy look earlier when she announced that morning that the Emperor wished to see him. The fleet would survive the day without his tricks, she’d said, before shoving him out of the room. 

Haggar had glared at him, had always looked at him like he was dirt beneath her heel. Right now, the Emperor just looks - 

\- amused. Keith is just  _ amusing _ to him. Most of the Galra don’t know how to feel about him, but only the Emperor thinks of him as  _ amusing _ . But this is the long game they’re both playing. Keith will take amusing. 

“Haggar tells me that you’ve been pestering her about the Champion.” 

“And if I have?” He should know better than to take  _ that tone _ with the Emperor. And he does.

The Emperor just laughs for Keith’s efforts, shifting forward in his chair. Someday, the Emperor will lose his patience with Keith. Someday, he’ll be tired of dealing with his impudence and his daring and his near-constant challenges.

But until then,  _ this _ is the fastest way to get answers. The Emperor likes games he thinks he can win. 

“Tell me this, Keith. What do you know of our war efforts against the Earthlings?” 

Keith narrows his eyes. It’s a stupid diversion tactic, and Keith still doesn’t have the answers he wanted, but  _ the Emperor _ is to be “above reproach”, if Haggar is to be believed. 

So, then. What does he know about the war? “Maybe if your generals actually considered the plans that I’ve written, it’d go better.” 

The generals are as arrogant as the Earthlings are clever. The Earthlings don’t have the same overwhelming numbers that the Galra do, but they’re tenacious and they’re innovative and they’re unpredictably stupid sometimes. But those humans - bizarre and erratic - have an  _ edge _ somehow.

“My generals don’t respect you.” The Emperor isn’t wrong. (And also,  _ my _ ? How irritating.) The generals stare down their furry noses at him for everything his father passed down to him: his pale skin, his black hair, his bruise-gray eyes. “You haven’t earned it.” 

“So give me the chance then,” Keith bites out. His hands are clenched so tight it aches. He hates every single last Galra, but he wants to be on the winning side at least. “I’ll make them respect me.” 

The Emperor looks thoughtful. Or he looks calculating. The expressions look the same on him, when he looks at Keith like that. His voice is smoky and smug, “You want to prove yourself. Let me make that happen.” 

A shiver runs through Keith before he can suppress it. The Emperor giving gifts is dangerous. And this is the biggest gift that he’s ever given Keith. 

“You’ll have the Champion under your command, even.” 

Scratch that.  _ Now _ it’s the biggest gift he’s ever given Keith, and for the first time since he was assigned to the war, he feels fear slithering down his spine. 

xxx

The Champion’s cell has guards stationed at every entrance. Not real Galra, but also not the drone models that die by the thousands. These are droids that are made with a purpose, guns pointed decisively, even at him, as he steps in front of the cell. 

The Emperor’s seal drawn into the back of his armor is the only thing that stops the guards from attacking him when he stands in front of the bars to the Champion’s cell. 

His initial assessment wasn’t wrong, disappointingly enough, and that very fact makes his stomach twist harshly. The Champion’s hair is long and unkempt, his clothes in tatters, but he is still devastatingly beautiful, even hunched over in the corner of his cell. His eyes are wary and focused in on Keith. They watch him like how a predator would watch another.

“You’re the Champion.” It’s not a question. The Champion doesn’t pretend like he’s asked one. His eyes don’t move. Keith exhales and tries to feel as cool and calm and brave as he’s supposed to be. “I’m your new Commander.”

The Champion’s eyes narrow. His voice scratches when he speaks, “You’re human.” 

“No, I’m not,” Keith says, and he knows he’s spoken too hotly, too defensively. The Champion stands, and the guns finally flick off of Keith and onto that man. His shoulders are wide and built powerfully. His bicep alone is probably the size of Keith’s face. He’s used to that with other Galra, but on a human, it’s a little horrifying. “My name is Keith, and I  _ will _ be your Com -”

He stalks towards Keith with the finely edged moves of a warrior. It’s enough to stop his words cold. “You’re a human, and you’re working with them?” 

“I’m your Commander!” Keith says firmly. He doesn’t shout. He is  _ not _ going to lose control like this. “That’s all.” 

It’s not. It’s not even close to everything. He wants to know so much more: who the Champion was before this, what humans are like, where he can find  _ more _ of them. But he can’t. He can’t, he’s already turned on his heel and walked out. 

xxx

When he rolls out the marbles that night and lets them settle on the table, smoky quartz still orbits his red, and Keith knows that he can’t run from the Champion again.

xxx

The rest period is quiet. Keith still pulls his hood a little closer to his face, though. It’s not  _ that  _ quiet, though. The sentry drones are still doing their rounds, and he’s not going to let them catch him before he’s good and ready. He palms a hand over his marble pouch, just to be sure they’re still there. 

They are. Keith’s confidence is bolstered only a little bit by this. 

The ship engines purr in low orbit. The view of Earth is gorgeous and so,  _ so _ blue when he passes it in the window. He only gets this moment, though. He has a Champion to bust out, and then they’ll get the chance to ogle Earth when they’re escaping. 

Keith keeps his steps light as he approaches the cell block area. He tries for casual as he approaches the nearby terminal and pretends like his hands aren’t shaking when he activates his subroutines. 

And now, he has fifteen minutes and a sprint down to the Champion’s cell. 

He gives a vicious jab to the guards that are stationed around the Champion specifically, and the sense of satisfaction is visceral as he steps up to the coding area for the bars. They still buzz cheerily, but they won’t for long. Keith’s practiced this. 

“What is this,” the Champion growls, and Keith’s kind of curious if his voice ever goes above a feral hum. 

Keith levels him a glare for a moment, because that’s all he can spare, trying to hack this code. “Stand back, will you?” 

“What are you doing?” 

“I’m telling you to stand back,” Keith grits out. One of the wires goes free with a hard yank, and he can crow over his victory when they’re somewhere safe. “Five seconds.” 

The Champion has the good sense to listen to him. The bars fry a moment after with a bright pop, a good deal louder than Keith had expected. Eight minutes. 

“I’m getting you out, follow me,” Keith hisses, and they have less than eight minutes now. He’ll credit the time crunch later to the Champion sneaking up behind him and slamming him against the wall. A thick forearm is laid against his throat; the other hand is wrapped tight around his wrist, trapped against the wall.

“Why are you doing this?” The Champion’s arm glows. When did it start doing that? 

“I’m trying to help.” It comes out more garbled than he wanted it to. “We have seven minutes.” 

“Fine.” The Champion glares down at him for another heartbeat before he draws back. He doesn’t drop Keith’s hand, though. 

“Okay? Just.” Keith clears his throat, and that looks like a flash of guilt that crosses the Champion’s face. “Just come with me. We have to go now.” 

He turns around with somewhat more caution this time. 

xxx

The hangar is alive around them, but everyone is too distracted and that gives them the space to move around. Even in the rest period, the hangar has pilots still stumbling around caring for their machines and security drones still routinely doing laps. They end up crouched behind a set of crates close to Keith’s ship, the Champion’s hand still heavy on his wrist.  His hand is cool,

It’s different. 

But Keith doesn’t have the time to think about this. They have less than a minute.

“Now!” Keith bolts from their hiding place, and the Champion easily keeps pace with him. He ascends to the cockpit with quick scramble, but the Champion makes it look easy as he hauls himself up and in. 

The cockpit seals around them as the alarm starts screeching. 

The sounds of frantic assembly settle around him as Keith’s eyes settle around the controls, and everything feels... _ almost _ right. “I need both hands to fly.”

“Right.” The Champion actually lets go. He lets him steady his focus on getting them out. Keith’s heart is jackhammering with adrenaline of it all. “Get us out of here.” 

“Hang on tight.” 

The ship purrs to life under his hands. Keith’s exhale is shaky and loud in the space between him and the Champion, but his grip on the controls is solid. They’re getting out of here. 

Their ship lifts up, deceptively quiet in the commotion around them as an explosion rocks the whole battleship. The charges he planted earlier were a bit of a whim and a great bit more of a desperation move, but they had gone off beautifully. 

The Champion’s eyes are wild and nervous, when Keith spares a glance at him over his shoulder. The laugh that leaves him is a little raw, but he doesn’t have time for sympathy.

The fleet is starting to scramble, and that’s their ticket out.

xxx

They zip out with the rest of the fleet into the silence of space. The alarms are behind them now, and Earth is in front of them, and it’s  _ amazing _ . It steals the breath right out of Keith’s lungs. He thought it’d be the same for the Champion, but his expression is only shuttered and wounded. 

He doesn’t trust Keith, and he carefully doesn’t think about how much that hurts. 

“They won’t miss us.” That’s a lie. That’s a lie that the Champion needs to hear, though, no matter how bitter it tastes in Keith’s mouth. “I need to know where to land this thing.” 

They hurtle around in low orbit with the other ships for a few more moments before the Champion quietly says, “Head for that land mass.” He points to one that’s faced halfway between them and the yellow star - the Sun? - and surrounded by big, blue ocean on both sides. “I have friends there.” 

“You’ve got it.”

In their next pass around the Earth, Keith takes them in lower and flips on the camouflage, and then they’re headed down. They fly down at Earth fast enough that it feels like Keith’s heart lodged up in his threat, but. 

No one comes after them. 

That’s not as relieving as it should be. 

The Champion’s hand clamps down on his shoulder, and Keith carefully doesn’t jump or jerk or visibly react in any way because he has better training than that. And also because he’s trying to enter Earth’s atmosphere and  _ not _ crash. 

“Yes?” he bites out instead. He grips the controls just a little tighter for it. 

“When we get closer, I’ll tell you where to go,” the Champion says simply. He’s not a man of many words, it seems. 

“How much closer?” 

“Not threatening to burn up upon entry closer.” 

xxx

The Champion is good on his word and Keith is good on his flying, and they land without a fuss in a dusty and dry and abandoned field somewhere in the middle of nowhere. They’d passed over a quiet city on their way, and Keith is going to guess that their camo is solid, given that they didn’t get shot at or have some other kind of military force brought down on their heads. 

“What’s your name?” Keith finally asks, as the cockpit unseals. Something is starting to rise over the horizon, but the Champion just looks at it. Wistfully. “I never asked.”

“Tired of calling me the Champion?” 

“That’s not really a name,” Keith says. All he gets is a look, so he speaks again, “I gave you mine.”

“Why did you do this?” The Champion says instead. Which, fine. Keith will keep calling him the Champion, then. “Why did you help me get out? And then get us to Earth?”

Keith shrugs and gives his marbles pouch a surreptitious pat. Still there. Still safe. Just this once, he put red in with the others, just to be sure it’d make the journey. 

He slides down from the ship and watches the Champion follows him after a few more moments. The Champion’s got two communication devices in his hand, both still silent, but Keith gives them a wary look anyway. The moment they go live, they’ll ping their location to every Galra agent floating above them. 

They can’t afford that right now. 

“You’re important,” Keith says. Is that an answer? The Champion doesn’t seem satisfied with it. 

“I’m not more important than every other prisoner on that ship.”

“Except you  _ are _ .” Is there another way he can say this? Is something about this not making sense to the Champion? “I had to get  _ you _ out, so I did, and the least you could do is be  _ grateful _ about it.” 

“Thank you.” The Champion says it like it pains him. 

Keith doesn’t roll his eyes, but it’s a close thing. Instead, he climbs back up and pulls out a small package from under his pilot’s chair. He tucks his marbles in carefully, before all of it gets tossed onto the Champion. If he doesn’t catch it, it’s his own fault. And while he’s up there, he starts pulling apart his armor, tossed around carelessly. 

He doesn’t need it. And he frankly doesn’t want it anymore. The only thing that stays is the knife strapped against the small of his back. 

The ship sitting here won’t go unnoticed forever even in this boring field, but might as well help it along. Keith keys in the self-destruct sequence and hops down quickly, shivering a little in the darkness. 

“Come on, it’s going to blow up in a couple minutes,” Keith says, tugging on the Champion’s wrist this time. 

He heads for the line of mountains out in the horizon, and the Champion comes with.

xxx

Keith doesn’t know what direction he’s headed in, and the Champion so helpfully reminds him of that after the explosion almost rocks him back into the man’s chest. The man’s very solid chest. It’s a little unfair, actually. 

“The city is back that way,” he says, when Keith manages to catch himself.

“You didn’t think to mention it earlier?” The Champion fucking  _ shrugs _ at him, and Keith just glares. “Fine, just give me back my stuff.” 

“What is this, anyways?” 

Keith pulls a black undershirt out and makes a show of waving it in front of the Champion’s face before he pulls it on. “Clothes.” 

The Champion doesn’t say anything when Keith pulls the pants on, at least. The marbles are there in the pocket thankfully. He tugs the jacket on quickly, then the shoes, and the gloves are last. The Champion watches him as he moves, and Keith wonders what that expression is supposed to be.  

“I had these prepared for weeks” he says, walking in the direction they’d just come, because they are  _ not _ going to be languishing out here in the middle of nowhere. It’s still freezing. “I knew I couldn’t walk around in armor. That would be a dead giveaway.” 

“No, you couldn’t,” the Champion says to himself mostly, and he looks a little more convinced. “Hey, wait.” 

“What is it? Aren’t we supposed to find,” Keith waves a hand around, “people?” 

“I called for transport.” 

That does get him to stop. 

“How?” 

“A friend,” the Champion says. “There’s a code she taught me for your communicators. A virus she planted a long time ago.” 

“Seriously?” Keith can’t keep the wonder out of his voice. He chances a glance down at the communicators that are held in the Champion’s hands, on and  _ not _ flashing. The Galra fleet hasn’t assembled on their position. They’re  _ actually _ safe. “You hacked those things?” 

“Like it’s hard?” 

The Champion’s smile is feral. Keith has been staring at it for too long.

“She gave me an ETA of ten minutes. She’s coming for us here. Probably five now?” The Champion looks up at the sky that’s just starting to color now with light. And this achingly beautiful world with its rainbow skies is what the Galra want to destroy, and Keith certainly won’t have difficulty finding it in himself to knock them down a few pegs. 

Over on the horizon, the sun is coming up, and Keith wants to  _ watch _ , but the Champion tugs on his jacket sleeve and he’s forced to look away, back to him. “What, what is it?” It’s hard to keep the annoyance out of his voice. 

“The sun’s bad for your eyes. You can’t look directly at it,” he says, and Keith could almost laugh at the absurdity of it.

He does, actually. Laugh. It feels good. “Maybe your eyes.” 

“You’re human, though, aren’t you?” And Keith suddenly doesn’t like the way the Champion’s dark eyes are looking at him. “Your eyes are like mine.” 

“I’m not,” Keith says automatically. The response is rote by now. 

The Champion doesn’t say anything, wisely. He has to have some kind of self-preservation instinct, after all. He’s survived this long. “You asked me about my name. It’s Shiro.”

Never mind. Clearly, Keith was too hasty in his assessment of the man. 

“I don’t care.” 

“Then why’d you ask earlier?” 

“You think that we’re similar,” Keith says slowly, because if he doesn’t, he’ll reach for his knife. “That’s why you’re telling me now. Because you’ve decided to trust me.” 

He shrugs. “I think you try hard to pretend you’re like them, but you’re not, no matter how hard you try. You helped me.”

“That was for  _ me _ ,” Keith says hotly. That’s not a lie, at least. It had been for himself as much as it was for Shiro. “There was no way that the Emperor was going to let me lead the next attack and made a fool of all of his generals. I wasn’t going to survive. He would’ve done something to arrange my ‘accident’.”

Shiro’s face is equal parts devastating and infuriating. His eyes catch the growing light from the horizon in the best way. His hair is dark, and it looks soft, except for the single lock of white that almost hangs in front of his eyes, and Keith wants to punch that smirk right off his face. 

“Then why’d you help me out?” 

“I had to.” He doesn’t want to mention the marbles. Shiro doesn’t get to know about them yet. (And, when did he start to think about a  _ yet _ ?)

“I still appreciate it,” Shiro says, and it’s almost swallowed in the wild, whipping whine that starts up from somewhere above them. 

Keith jumps back instinctively, his knife flashing out against - 

Absolutely no one. Nothing he can fight, at least. There’s a black  _ machine _ of some kind headed down towards them that descends to the nearby empty road. There’s a spinning halo above it, which must keep it aloft, but nothing comes out of it. 

Shiro smiles. 

Devastatingly beautiful. 

xxx

Shiro jogs for the thing, but Keith takes a more reserved approach. The knife is still in his hand, because he’s not an idiot. These are Shiro’s comrades, and Keith is still Galra. 

The wind generated by the machine keeps mussing his hair and slapping it into his face, though, and he could really do without that.

“Pidge!” Shiro shouts, and something waves from the front window. Another human, Keith realizes. Two humans even, since he kind of doubts that there are two-headed humans. The closest one has long, light brown hair that’s pulled up into a high ponytail, and the other has the same light brown hair, but it’s cropped short. The short-haired one has glasses. Both of them wear elaborate and heavy headsets. 

The wave must be some kind of sign between them, because Shiro jumps up into the  _ contraption _ without another thought for Keith, strapping himself in. Keith still has his knife out, hanging loose in his hand at his side and watches the grass flatten under the breeze generated by the machine. 

Well.

Now what? 

He itches for his marbles. Maybe when this stupid thing leaves, he’ll ask. Maybe he’ll even get answers. 

“Hey.” 

Keith’s eyes slide up to the Champion - Shiro - where he holds out his hand. Somehow, he hadn’t noticed when they were making their escape, but almost the whole arm is a chrome and purple monstrosity. No doubt something of Haggar’s design. Keith carefully pushes down the fluttering that starts up under his collarbone when he sees this stupid, meaningless gesture.

“Get in.” 

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @[apolloinred](http://apolloinred.tumblr.com/) on tumblr! come hang out with me!


End file.
